Given the high cost of computer-animated films, rare are the
movies these days that were quite common less than two decades ago — movies
that operated from an economic model of predetermined defeat, pitching themselves
down to the smallest of kiddies and conceding their only adult audience would
be begrudging parents accompanying their tykes to weekend or summer matinees.
Nowadays,
it seems every animated movie wants to swing, Shrek-style, for the fences, cramming in enough
winking pop
cultural references and visual gags to lure older teens and adult audiences to
the theater while still seeding their often simple, fable-esque narratives with
enough primary colors, boisterous supporting characters and flatulence jokes to
please young kids.
Monster House,
though, using the same motion-capture-based animation technique pioneered by
Robert Zemeckis (also a producer here) on The
Polar Express, represents a unique sort of risk. Rated PG, the movie is
easily scary enough to freak out 5- or 6-year-olds. Built around the old
chestnut of a haunted abode but powered by appealing tweener characters and
told with a slightly more adult sensibility — or at least one rooted more in
the traditional filmic angles of live action — Monster House plays legitimately and quite pleasingly to broad
audiences of almost any age, but it’s also a movie which could have trouble
wooing that broader segment of the movie-going public that turns out for the Shrek movies, unless word-of-mouth
catches fire.
The story centers around gangly, 12-year-old DJ (voiced by
Mitchel Musso) and his chubby best friend, Chowder (voiced by Sam Lerner). When
DJ’s parents head out of town on the eve of Halloween and leave him in the care
of disinterested babysitter Zee (voiced by Maggie Gyllenhaal), DJ and Chowder
run afoul of the former’s spindly, frightening, elderly neighbor, Nebbercracker
(voiced by Steve Buscemi). After a confrontation in which Nebbercracker suffers
a heart attack, the old man’s sinister, anthropomorphized house starts striking
out and taking all sorts of punitive action.
After an all-night stakeout by the boys, the next day spunky
young Jenny (voiced by Spencer Locke) wanders by selling candy door-to-door, and
the trio hatch a quick plan to lull the house to sleep — a humorous bit
involving a dummy crudely fashioned out of a vacuum cleaner filled with bottles
of cough syrup — and infiltrate it. They at first fail, waylaid by a pair of bumbling
Keystone cops (voiced by Kevin James and Nick Cannon), but as the house comes
to life and further snaps up unsuspecting passersby, DJ, Chowder and Jenny
uncover a series of astonishing secrets about both Nebbercracker and his home
that will eventually help them defeat the monstrous rampaging structure.
The film’s story is fairly simple and its characterizations
definitely hew closely to those of the Harry
Potter series, but what Monster House
most has going for it is a finely balanced sense of cheerfulness and plucky bonhomie
— courtesy of some great work by its young voice cast — and authentic chills. Younger
kids will respond to the movie’s foreboding and intermittent menace in a
genuine way, while teens and older adults can still chiefly enjoy its lively
patter and spunky asides (“My mom’s out at a movie with her personal trainer,”
notes Chowder blithely) while viewing the thrills through a more detached,
nostalgic lens.
Neophtye director Gil Kenan — who came to the attention of
producers Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg courtesy of The Lark, an undergraduate short blending animation and live action
— overdials the action of the finalé a bit, but deftly deploys a variety of
low-angle and deep focus shots that provide as a nice visual counterbalance to
the kid-friendly story. It certainly helps, too, that Dan Harmon & Rob
Schrab and Pamela Pettler’s screenplay — originally written as a live action
film and more straightforward thriller about a possessed house — is studded
with funny lines and an array of amusingly idiosyncratic details. A jostling
romantic rivalry between DJ and Chowder for Jenny’s attention is there for
slightly older kids to either take or leave, but it doesn’t infringe at all
upon the story’s momentum.
In an era of pleasant but frequently unsurprising sequels
and meticulously muggy, corporate-vetted movies designed to stoke the embers of
a possible franchise before the first film has even released, it’s not often
that animated films succeed on their own terms like Monster House does. (Columbia/Sony Pictures
Imageworks, PG, 89 mins.)
